Wyoming budgets $2.5 million for wolf management

It’s just amazing from a benefit/cost standpoint (assuming wolves have no benefits).

Wolves do maybe $200,000 damage and state appropriates more than ten times that to monitor them, collar them and kill them, and of course give oh so generous reimbursement (7x) to livestock operators who are lucky enough to have a wolf kill a lamb or a calf in the trophy game area in the NW corner of the state.

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About The Author

Ralph Maughan

Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University with specialties in natural resource politics, public opinion, interest groups, political parties, voting and elections. Aside from academic publications, he is author or co-author of three hiking/backpacking guides, and he is President of the Western Watersheds Project.

8 Responses to Wyoming budgets $2.5 million for wolf management

Combine 7x market value reimbursement with a pathological hatred of wolves, and you have an an irresistable incentive to bait and slaughter. This will make the alleged baiting incident reported in John Dougherty’s HCN article (see Jeff N.’s post in “We must howl to Congress to keep the green fire alive”) look like child’s play.

The political pressure to control wolves and attempt to box them up in the national parks is intense here in Wyoming. The $2.5 million appropriated for wolf management referred in the linked story from the JH News & Guide will be directed, in my professional opinion, toward the goal of aerial gunning to reduce wolves’ alleged deleterious impacts on elk herds in northwest Wyoming, most of which are still above objective and most of which are still burdened with late season cow calf hunts designed to reduce the populations to objective.

In short, wolf control to “protect” Wyoming elk will be used as a cover to kill wolves for political and cultural reasons.

Q: I have heard that people will be able to kill wolves from airplanes. Is that true?
A: After wolves are delisted, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department will likely use aerial gunning in some cases to remove wolves that are killing livestock. This has been
shown to be the most effective way to remove wolves in these situations. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has used this practice extensively in Wyoming to assist livestock
owners that may be experiencing losses from wolves. However, the public will not be able to kill wolves from airplanes within the Trophy Game area. Members of the public could be issued a permit by the Wyoming Department of Agriculture to use aircraft to remove wolves within the Predatory Animal area to protect livestock.

Q: Will it be legal to kill wolves by poisoning them in Wyoming?
A: Poisoning is not a legal method to take wolves within the Trophy Game area. Wolves within the Predatory Animal area may be taken by the use of poison only in compliance
with applicable Environmental Protection Agency and state statutes and regulations, and to the extent authorized by the surface management agency, if on public lands.

I’ve not been able to find a “scientific” justification for the 7x formula. It appears to have been suggested by an economic study on Mexican wolves, but the ratio of confirmed to unconfirmed kills was simply the ratio between confirmed kills and rancher estimates of losses to wolves.

Given how Wyoming ranchers have never missed an opportunity to procure another subsidy from the public purse, the development of the 7x formula seems simply to follow traditional practice. It’s an addiction.

The 7X number seems completely arbitrary to me. I’ve had it quoted to me that “Wolves kill seven times as many cows as we find they have killed”, but nobody has ever been able to put to where that estimation has come from. Anybody seen the origin for this or is at arbitrary as I think it is?

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‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."